


Orpheus

by losselen (zambla)



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot
Genre: F/M, Poetry, community: a_humumentathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-01-19
Packaged: 2018-03-08 05:16:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3196706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/losselen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Orpheus wandering through the modern landscape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orpheus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scythia](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=scythia).



> For the 2006 [[Humument-athon](http://a-humumentathon.livejournal.com/5717.html)].

  
  
  
_With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:_  
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.  
T.S. ELIOT “La Figlia che Piange”  
  
  
  
This was the joke full-scale  
Told with seasaltcopper, burning burning burning.  
He knew, he knew. He went anyway.  
  
It was the continental summer, still he went bruising  
The silence with cicada shells, holding  
The soft grasses, his ankles on the rolling  
Scarlet heat like two silver ribbons, watching  
Her swaying dance to heat drumming.  
The July blue sky crackled, split.  
His uncle handed him the mandolin years ago,  
For which he made a case that’s now falling apart.  
He can play three melodies, carries  
It everywhere. She thought it was Darling.  
She had even said, when are you going  
To marry me? I’ll say yes, you know.  
She wore a yellow sundress. He  
twirled her hair and said pleadingly  
But your father—(Of course, you know that  
Father doesn’t approve of musicians. No one ever does!)  
O He knew! He knew this.  
He ran when she fell, caught her,  
And missed. Her fell cry, lost  
In the ripe crops, came ripping  
black, deep, beginning some haunting  
composition if he only had the time.  
Oh! She pressed, silent  
Soft to earth and the snake that bit her, docile  
Singularly, momentarily, with her  
Dolor eyes receding darkly, her whole disjunct  
Body dissipated as if melting from the poison.  
  
He knew, then. To begin a direction was  
Probably easy: Tiresias pointed the way  
With his dirt-covered blindman’s stick.  
He dusted her body, and lying  
Shielded in the first few nights, screaming  
At the sticky milky timescape, picking  
Through the grassblades, chewing  
The uneasy moisture that rose,  
He waited for the decay to cease, the  
Stink to sink, and her soul to rise.  
He played the mandolin, same  
Three damned melodies, same  
Three struck sentences, same  
Three moaning sounds even the crows  
Had fled for silence. He followed them.  
Ah, adieu to the boys of Jarama,  
Along the 61 north an hour you hit Clarksdale,  
Wind south there and it’s Ramsdale  
Backwards up the Congo you hit a diamond mine,  
And if he’s careful enough he’ll  
See the river.  
  
(“My boy!” his dad used to say and never  
Mean it; an old convention of  
A patrimonial hierarchy. “Stop fiddling  
With that piece of wood, and come here,  
My boy, step into this light.”  
He fit to them fives different verses  
And a burden, and he, too, disliked  
All this fiddle.)  
  
   Still following the blind wiseman  
He waved a ferry down: not that this  
Worked on Thames River, but the gray bald man was  
Whimpering so loud he could not hear the question  
-Where are you going  
I’m not sure. To London, L.A., Peloponnesus  
Take me beyond Boreas, if you dare  
Take me to Tiananmen Square.  
-WHERE ARE YOU GOING  
I don’t know, man, just move,  
Row your boat, Michael, to that shore  
To the enchanted East!  
Hey, sir, just across that dusty river  
That lusty month, the cruel breeding  
Lilacs, the poppyflowered grave,  
The flamebound ether feeding  
With many a violent and strange octave  
Bound here—bound there—  
You don’t know, do you now,  
How quick turns the hangman’s lime  
To your clay to your hanging man  
To his poor abstracted time.  
 _HURRY UP IT’S TIME_  
WHERE ARE YOU GOING  
  
At the end of it all, it was the river  
That knew the direction. He was washed to the  
Doorsteps that read: KNOW THYSELF in relief  
Letters. A cellophane jazzman  
Played something the marriage of  
Coltrane and Gauthier, and Stephen,  
The hero, waited brooding by the window  
Looking over the green sea, _the white breast_  
Of the dim sea. Below him, guarding  
The double-wing door waited the Ungeziefer  
In the velveteen dark— _a screaming_  
Comes across the sky; the condition  
Of madness, fallen toward the flame growing  
To fill the thoracic cavern—  
A casual world, a half-world.  
He remembered her and broke  
His wedge of cheese, which he ate  
And fed away the remains. Above him the blank  
Shade, a dark with eager snarling  
Pupils, twisting out its locomotive screaming  
Came flaring, too, so far and intimate  
Into the Dark that he thought of  
Hobbes, the animated orange  
Tiger, who wanted kisses to keep under his  
Nightly dreams of Kafka.  
   Still, he went on, in a shared hitchhike  
Ride—his entire vehicle was turned  
Inward, bound inside, to the blank unhappy  
Shade, swelling, the lone dolphin of a shoulder  
And hunger in his eternally rubbish  
Limbs, his forever parched tongue.  
He metered out his time and threw  
Potato salad as Solomon had once done,  
Wearing his wig of blood, his blue  
Turned Algiers murder, the same  
Resonant water of four unhappy knocks.  
   He came to neon streets of Paris,  
The grotesque shade of the oxidized gargoyles,  
The city in its own dust, wanting to  
Be pure. He saw it all—even  
The paleeyed boy stretching to  
His wings full span: his full possession  
Of truth, beauty, and the senses.  
He moved through the Seasons and  
Nights of Hell, hailed the collaged  
Hallucinations, and came singing  
To the throne room in the Shade’s  
Narrow grove, still plucking the mandolin.  
He sang those plaintive chords, lifting  
To the deathsick, bare brief world,  
To the highest guardswoman  
In her Bacchanal river, her Cydnus  
Boat. He played her the mandolin, same  
Three damned melodies, same  
Three struck sentences, same  
Three moaning sounds that her throat fell  
Dry in all that was said and her tear fell  
Like a pin to the floor. Gosh, you’re good!  
She came. She clapped, skipped, danced with  
Nuptial veil and a clutch of whitestars.  
O but he played on, plucking the  
Skin with his plectrum, clawing  
Out the long, sustained notes, churning  
The ichor, the secretive ambrosia, gnawing  
The varied, senseless thoughts.  
Nothing moved but Sisyphus and his  
Rock, the Coney Island  
Minds, the incomprehensible floating cities,  
The deathplanes of impossible life,  
The freeways like lost necklaces, the soft night,  
The vile bodies, the free and unbound  
Fear, and all of it, all of it dust.  
Nothing moved but he turned back,  
And nothing moved still, but the silence,  
 _The disintegration was already taking place,_  
The sudden nothingness, and her soft  
Sad uncertain eyes rustling in the haze  
Backwards up, to the farmland aloft  
Forever gone, to the direction of his unfocused gaze.


End file.
